FRANK SWINNERTON 



PERSONAL SKETCHES 



ARNOLD BENNETT 

H. G. WELLS 
GRANT M. OVERTON 




NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DOBAN COMPANY 




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Book 



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PRESF.NTEn BY \ C^ ^ Q 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

Personal Sketches 



BY FRANK SWINNERTON 

September 

Shops and Houses 

Nocturne 

The Chaste Wife 

On the Staircase 

The Happy Family 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 




|nctl^Jk SiJVtvi\*4&-vr^ 



R.J. SWAN, 1919. 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

Personal Sketches 

by 

ARNOLD BENNETT 

H. G. WELLS 

GRANT M. OVERTON 



Together with Notes 

and Comments on the Novels of 

Frank Swinnerton 




NEW ^nSP" YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






Copyright, 1920 
George H. Doran Company 



Gift 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

A Personal Sketch 
By ARNOLD BENNETT 

THERE was nothing in the slightest de- 
gree romantic or marvellous in my first 
meeting with Frank Swinnerton. It all hap- 
pened in the most ordinary way. One day, 
perhaps eight or nine years ago, I received 
a novel entitled The Casement. I was then 
living in a very mediaeval pavilion in an old 
quarter of Paris. I remember quite well that 
an American friend came for Christmas Eve 
dinner in this fastness or fortress. I had a 
new and wondrous coffee-machine of which I 
was proud, and in which I made the coffee 
with my own hands. On that night I put the 
ground coffee in the wrong end of the ma- 
chine, with the result that finally the precious 
liquid inundated the whole of the sideboard 
instead of reaching the cups; also the mediae- 
val oil-lamps were left with the wicks too 
high in the drawing-room, so that when we 
returned to the drawing-room after mopping 
up the coffee, every object therein was evenly 
covered with a coat of greasy black soot, and 

[ 5 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

the opaque atmosphere scorched the eyes and 
parched the throat. 

To return to The Casement. The book 
was accompanied by a short, rather curt note 
from the author, Frank Swinnerton, politely 
indicating that if I cared to read it he v/ould 
be glad, and implying that if I didn't care to 
read it, he should endeavor still to survive. I 
would quote the letter, but I cannot find it — 
no doubt for the reason that all my corre- 
spondence is carefully filed on the most mod- 
ern filing system. I did not read The Case- 
ment for a long time. Why should I conse- 
crate three irrecoverable hours or so to the 
work of a man as to whom I had no creden- 
tials? Why should I thus introduce foreign 
matter into the delicate cogwheels of my 
programme of reading? However, after a 
delay of weeks, heaven in its deep wisdom 
inspired me with a caprice to pick up the 
volume. 

I had read, without fatigue but on the 
other hand without passionate eagerness, 
about a hundred pages before the thought 
suddenly occurred to me : "I do not remem- 
ber having yet come across one single ready- 
made phrase in this story." Such was my 

[ 6 ] ' 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

first definable thought concerning Frank 
Swinnerton. I hate ready-made phrases, 
which in my view — and in that of Schopen- 
hauer — are the sure mark of a mediocre 
writer. I began to be interested. I soon said 
to myself: "This fellow has a distinguished 
style." I then perceived that the character- 
drawing was both subtle and original, the 
atmosphere delicious, and the movement of 
the tale very original, too. The novel stirred 
me — not by its powerfulness, for it did not 
set out to be powerful — but by its individual- 
ity and distinction. I thereupon wrote to 
Frank Swinnerton. I forget entirely what I 
said. But I know that I decided that I must 
meet him. 

When I came to London, considerably 
later, I took measures to meet him, at the 
Authors' Club. He proved to be young; I 
daresay twenty-four or twenty-five — medium 
height, medium looks, medium clothes, some- 
what reddish hair, and lively eyes. If I had 
seen him in a motorbus I should never have 
said: "A remarkable chap," — no more than 
if I had seen myself in a motorbus. My im- 
pressions of the interview were rather like 
my impressions of the book; at first some- 



[ 7 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

what negative, and only very slowly becoming 
positive. He was reserved, as became a 
young author; I was reserved, as became an 
older author; we were both reserved, as be- 
came Englishmen. Our views on the only 
important thing in the world — that is to say, 
fiction — agreed, not completely, but in the 
main; it would never have done for us to 
agree completely. I was as much pleased by 
what he didn't say as by what he said; quite 
as much by the indications of the stock inside 
the shop as by the display in the window. 
The interview came to a calm close. My 
knowledge of him acquired from it amounted 
to this, that he held decided and righteous 
views upon Hterature, that his heart was not 
on his sleeve, and that he worked in a pub- 
lisher's office during the day and wrote for 
himself in the evenings. 

Then I saw no more of Swinnerton for a 
relatively long period. I read other books of 
his. I read The Young Idea, and The Happy 
Family, and, I think, his critical work on 
George Gissing. The Happy Family marked 
a new stage in his development. It has some 
really piquant scenes, and it revealed that 
minute knowledge of middle-class life in the 

[ 8 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

nearer suburbs of London, and that disturb- 
ing insight into the hearts and brains of quite 
unfashionable girls, which are two of his prin- 
cipal gifts. I read a sketch of his of a com- 
monplace crowd walking round a bandstand 
which brought me to a real decision as to his 
qualities. The thing was like life, and it was 
bathed in poetry. 

Our acquaintance proceeded slowly, and I 
must be allowed to assert that the initiative 
which pushed it forward was mine. It made 
a jump when he spent a week-end in the 
Thames Estuary on my yacht. If any reader 
has a curiosity to know what my yacht is not 
like, he should read the striking yacht chap- 
ter in Nocturne. I am convinced that Swin- 
nerton evolved the yacht in Nocturne from 
my yacht; but he ennobled, magnified, deco- 
rated, enriched and bejewelled it till honestly 
I could not recognize my wretched vessel. 
The yacht in Nocturne is the yacht I want, 
ought to have, and never shall have. I envy 
him the yacht in Nocturne, and my envy takes 
a malicious pleasure in pointing out a mistake 
in the glowing scene. He anchors his yacht 
in the middle of the Thames — as if the ty- 
rannic authorities of the Port of London 

[ 9 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

would ever allow a yacht, or any other craft, 
to anchor in midstream ! 

After the brief cruise our friendship grew 
rapidly. I now know Swinnerton — probably 
as well as any man knows him; I have pene- 
trated into the interior of the shop. He has 
done several things since I first knew him — 
rounded the corner of thirty, grown a beard, 
under the orders of a doctor, and physically 
matured. Indeed he looks decidedly stronger 
than in fact he is — he was never able to 
pass the medical examination for the army. 
He is still in the business of publishing, being 
one of the principal personages in the ancient 
and well-tried firm of Chatto and Windus, 
the English publishers of Swinburne and 
Mark Twain. He reads manuscripts, includ- 
ing his own — and including mine. He re- 
fuses manuscripts, though he did accept one 
of mine. He tells authors what they ought 
to do and ought not to do. He is marvellously 
and terribly particular and fussy about the 
format of the books issued by his firm. Ques- 
tions as to fonts of type, width of margins, 
disposition of title-pages, tint and texture of 
bindings really do interest him. And mis- 
prints — especially when he has read the 
proofs himself — give him neuralgia and even 

[ 10 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

worse afflictions. Indeed he is the ideal pub- 
Hsher for an author. 

Nevertheless, publishing is only a side-line 
of his. He still writes for himself in the 
evenings and at week-ends — the office never 
sees him on Saturdays. Among the chief 
literary events of nineteen seventeen was 
Nocturne, which he wrote in the evenings 
and at week-ends. It is a short book, but the 
time in which he wrote it was even shorter. 
He had scarcely begun it when it was finished. 
In regard to the result I am prepared to say 
to the judicious reader unacquainted with 
Swinnerton's work, "Read Nocturne'\ — and 
to stand or fall, and to let him stand or fall, 
by the result. Nocturne moved H. G. Wells 
to an extraordinary enthusiasm, so much so 
that Wells had to write to the morning 
papers about it. And I remember Wells say- 
ing to me : "You know, Arnold, he achieves 
a perfection in Nocturne that you and I never 
get within streets of." A hard saying to pass 
between two hardened pilgrims whose com- 
bined years total over a century; but justified. 
You can say what you like about Nocturne, 
but you cannot say that on its own scale it is 



[ 11 ] 



^ 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

not perfect, consummate. At least, I can- 
not. 

Besides being no mean publisher and a 
novelist who has produced several fine and 
one perfect novel, Frank Swinnerton has 
other gifts. He is a surpassingly good racon- 
teur. By which I do not signify that the man 
who meets Swinnerton for the first, second or 
third time will infallibly ache with laughter 
at his remarks. Swinnerton only blossoms 
in the right atmosphere; he must know ex- 
actly where he is; he must be perfectly sure 
of his environment, before the flower un- 
closes. And he merely relates what he has 
seen, what he has taken part in. The narra- 
tions would be naught if he were not the nar- 
rator. His effects are helped by the fact that 
he is an excellent mimic and by his utter real- 
istic mercilessness. But like all first-class 
realists he is also a romantic, and in his mer- 
cilessness there is a mysterious touch of fund- 
amental benevolence — as befits the attitude 
of one who does not worry because human 
nature is not something different from what 
it actually is. Lastly, in this connection, he 
has superlatively the laugh known as the "in- 
fectious laugh." When he laughs everybody 

[ 12 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

laughs, everybody has to laugh. There are 
men who tell side-splitting tales with the face 
of an undertaker — for example, Irvin Cobb. 
There are men who tell side-splitting tales 
and openly and candidly rollick in them from 
the first word; and of these latter is Frank 
Swinnerton. But Frank Swinnerton can be 
more cruel than Irvin Cobb. Indeed, some- 
times, when he is telling a story, his face be- 
comes exactly like the face of Mephistoph- 
eles in excellent humour with the world's sin- 
fulness and idiocy. 

Swinnerton's other gift is the critical. It 
has been said that an author cannot be at once 
a first-class critic and a first-class creative arl- 
ist. To which absurdity I reply : What 
about William Dean Howells? And what 
about Henry James, to name no other names? 
Anyhow, if Swinnerton excels in fiction he 
also excels in literary criticism. The fact that 
the literary editor of The Manchester Guard- 
ian wrote and asked him to write literary 
criticism for The Manchester Guardian will 
perhaps convey nothing to the American citi- 
zen. But to the Englishman of literary taste 
and experience it has enormous import. The 
Manchester Guardian publishes the most fas- 

[ 13 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

tidious and judicious literary criticism in 
Britain. 

I recall that once when Swinnerton was in 
my house I had there also a young military 
officer with a mad passion for letters and a 
terrific ambition to be an author. The offi- 
cer gave me a manuscript to read. I handed 
it over to Swinnerton to read, and then called 
upon Swinnerton to criticize it in the presence 
of both of us. "Your friend is very kind," 
said the officer to me afterwards, "but it was 
a frightful ordeal." 

The book on George Gissing I have al- 
ready mentioned. But it was Swinnerton's 
work on R. L. Stevenson that made the 
trouble in London. It is a destructive work. 
It is very bland and impartial, and not bereft 
of laudatory passages, but since its appear- 
ance Stevenson's reputation has never been 
the same. Those who wish to preserve their 
illusions about the greatness of Stevenson 
should refrain from reading it. Few recent 
books of criticism have aroused more hostility 
than Swinnerton's Stevenson. There is a pow- 
erful Stevenson cult in England, as there is in 
America. And in London there are sundry 
persons who cannot get far into any conver- 

[ 14 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

sation without using the phrase, "As dear old 
R. L. S. used to say." Some of these persons 
are personages. They rage at the mention 
of Swinnerton. One of them on a celebrated 
occasion exclaimed in fury: "Never let me 
hear that man's name!" This detail alone 
shows that Swinnerton is a real critic. Sham 
criticism, however violent, — and Swinnerton 
is incapable of violence — does not and can- 
not arouse such passion. 



[ 15] 



CONCERNING MR. SWINNERTON 
By H. G. WELLS 

"But do I see afore me, him as I ever sported with 
in his time of happy infancy? And may I — may I?" 
This May I, meant might he shake hands? 

— Dickens, Great Expectations. 

T DO not know why I should be so overpower- 
-■- ingly reminded of the immortal, if at times im- 
possible, Uncle Pumblechook, when I sit down to 
write a short preface to Mr. Swinnerton's Nocturne, 
Jests come at times out of the backwoods of a 
writer's mind. It is part of the literary quality 
that behind the writer there is a sub-writer, making 
a commentary. This is a comment against which 
I may reasonably expostulate, but which, neverthe- 
less, I am indisposed to ignore. 

The task of introducing a dissimilar writer to a 
new public has its own peculiar difficulties for the 
elder hand. I suppose logically a writer should 
have good words only for his own imitators. For 
surely he has chosen what he considers to be the 
best ways. What justification has he for praising 
attitudes he never adopted and commending meth- 
ods of treatment from which he has abstained ? The 
reader naturally receives his commendations with 
suspicion. Is this man, he asks, stricken with peni- 
tence in the flower of his middle-age? Has he but 
just discovered how good are the results that the 
other game, the game he has never played, can 



[ 17 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

give? Or has he been disconcerted by the criticism 
of the Young? The fear of the Young is the be- 
ginning of his wisdom. Is he taking this alien-spir- 
ited work by the hand simply to say defensively and 
vainly, "I assure you, indeed, I am 720/ an old 
fogy; I quite understand it." (There it is, I fancy, 
that the Pumblechook quotation creeps in.) To all 
of which suspicions, enquiries and objections, I will 
quote, tritely but conclusively, "In my Father's 
house are many mansions," or in the words of Mr. 
Kipling : 

There are five and forty ways 

Of composing tribal lays, 

And every blessed one of them is right. 

Indeed, now that I come to think it over, I have 
never in all my life read a writer of closely kindred 
method to my own that I have greatly admired; 
the confessed imitators give me all the discomfort 
without the relieving admission of caricature; the 
parallel instances I have always wanted to rewrite; 
while on the other hand for many totally dissimilar 
workers I have had quite involuntary admirations. 
It is not merely that I do not so clearly see how 
they are doing it, though that may certainly be a 
help; it is far more a matter of taste. As a writer 
I belong to one school and as a reader to another — 
as a man may like to make optical instruments and 
collect old china. Swift, Sterne, Jane Austen, 



[ 18 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

Thackeray, and the Dickens of Bleak House were 
the idols of my youthful imitation, but the con- 
temporaries of my early praises were Joseph Con- 
rad, W. H. Hudson, and Stephen Crane, all utterly 
remote from that English tradition. 

This much may sound egotistical, and the impa- 
tient reader may ask when I am coming to Mr. 
Swinnerton, to which the only possible answer is 
that I am coming to Mr. Swinnerton as fast as I 
can and that all this leads as straightly as possible 
to a definition of Mr. Swinnerton's position. The 
science of criticism is still crude in its classification, 
there are a multitude of different things being done 
that are all lumped together heavily as novels, they 
are novels as distinguished from romances, so long 
as they are dealing with something understood to 
be real. All that they have in common beyond that 
is that they agree in exhibiting a sort of story con- 
tinuum. But some of us are trying to use that story 
continuum to present ideas in action, others to pro- 
duce powerful excitements of this sort or that, while 
again others concentrate upon the giving of life as 
it is, seen only more intensely. Personally I have 
no use at all for life as it is except as raw material. 
It bores me to look at things unless there is also the 
idea of doing something with them. I should find 
a holiday, doing nothing amid beautiful scenery, not 



[ 19 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

a holiday, but a torture. The contemplative ecstasy 
of the saints would be hell to me. In the — I forget 
exactly how many — books I have written, it is al- 
ways about life being altered I write, or about 
people developing schemes for altering life. And I 
have never once "presented" life. My apparently 
most objective books are criticisms and incitements 
to change. Such a writer as Mr. Swinnerton, on 
the contrary, sees life and renders it with a steadi- 
ness and detachment and patience quite foreign to 
my disposition. He has no underlying motive. He 
sees and tells. His aim is the attainment of that 
beauty which comes with exquisite presentation. 
Seen through his art, life Is seen as one sees things 
through a crystal lens, more Intensely, more com- 
pleted, and with less turbidity. There the business 
begins and ends for him. He does not want you 
or anyone to do anything. 

Mr. Swinnerton is not alone among recent 
writers In this clear detached objectivity. But Mr. 
Swinnerton, like Mr. James Joyce, does not repu- 
diate the depths for the sake of the surface. His 
people are not splashes of appearance, but living 
minds. Jenny and Emmy in this book are realities 
Inside and out; they are Imaginative creatures so 
complete that one can think with ease of Jenny ten 
years hence or of Emmy as a baby. The fickle Alf 
Is one of the most perfect Cockneys — a type so easy 
to caricature and so hard to get true — In fiction. 
If there exists a better writing of vulgar lovemaking, 
so base, so honest, so touchingly mean and so touch- 
[ 20 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

ingly full of the craving for happiness than this, I 
do not know of it. Only a novelist who has had 
his troubles can understand fully what a dance 
among china cups, what a skating over thin ice, 
what a tight-rope performance is achieved in this 
astounding chapter. A false note, one fatal line, 
would have ruined it all. On the one hand lay 
brutality ; a hundred imitative louts could have writ- 
ten a similar chapter brutally, with the soul left 
out, we have loads of such ''strong stuff" and it is 
nothing; on the other side was the still more dread- 
ful fall into sentimentality, the tear of conscious 
tenderness, the redeeming glimpse of "better things" 
in Alf or Emmy that could at one stroke have con- 
verted their reality into a genteel masquerade. The 
perfection of Alf and Emmy is that at no point 
does a ''nature's gentleman" or a "nature's lady" 
show through and demand our refined sympathy. 
It is only by comparison with this supreme conver- 
sation that the affair of Keith and Jenny seems to 
fall short of perfection. But that also is at last 
perfected, I think, by Jenny's final, "Keith . . . 
Oh, Keith! . . ." 

Above these four figures again looms the majestic 
invention of "Pa." Every reader can appreciate the 
truth and humor of Pa, but I doubt if anyone with- 
out technical experience can realize how the atmos- 
phere is made and completed and rounded ofiE by 
Pa's beer, Pa's meals, and Pa's accident, how he 



[ 21 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

binds the bundle and makes the whole thing one, 
and what an enviable triumph his achievement is. 

But the book is before the reader and I will not 
enlarge upon its merits further. Mr. S winner ton 
has written four or five other novels before this one, 
but none of them compares with it in quality. His 
earlier books were strongly influenced by the work 
of George Gissing; they have something of the 
same fatigued grayness of texture and little of the 
same artistic completeness and intense vision of 
Nocturne. He has also made two admirable and 
very shrewd and thorough studies of the work and 
lives of Robert Louis Stevenson and George Gis- 
sing. Like these two, he has had great experience 
of illness. He is a young man of so slender a 
health, so frequently ill, that even for the most 
sedentary purposes of this war, his country w^ould 
not take him. It was in connection with his Gissing 
volume, for which I possessed some material he 
needed, that I first made his acquaintance. He has 
had something of Gissing's restricted and gray ex- 
periences, but he has nothing of Gissing's almost 
perverse gloom and despondency. Indeed he is as 
gay a companion as he is fragile. He is a twinkling 
addition to any Christmas party, and the twinkle is 
here in the style. And having sported with him '*in 
his times of happy infancy" I had an intimate and 
personal satisfaction to my pleasant task of saluting 



[ 22 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

this fine work that ends a brilliant apprenticeship 
and ranks Mr. Swinnerton as Master. 

This is a book that will not die. It is perfect, 
authentic, and alive. Whether a large and imme- 
diate popularity will fall to it, I cannot say, but 
certainly the discriminating will find it and keep it 
and keep it alive. If Mr. Swinnerton were never 
to write another word I think he might count on 
this much of his work living, when many of the 
more portentous reputations of to-day may have 
served their purpose in the world and become no 
more than fading names. 



[23] 



A CONVERSATION ABOUT 
FRANK SWINNERTON 

By p. M. 

MY great-aunt Eunice put down the book with 
a sniff. "So that's the kind of story young 
people like nowadays!" she sputtered. 

"Why, what's the matter with it?" I asked, much 
interested to know the effect of this entirely modern 
novel on one whose standard had always been loyally 
fixed on John Halifax, Gentleman. 

"There's nobody in it you can look up to," she 
complained. "No one stands out more than anyone 
else. Now which would you rather be yourself, 
if you had your choice — Emmy or Jenny?" 

"That's easy," I answered; "Jenny, of course." 

"Well, I wouldn't. Goodness knows, I'd hate to 
be either of them; but if I had to choose, I'd be 
Emmy. She at least was sure of a husband, even if 
he was only a shopkeeper, and she could look ahead 
to a life of security, whereas Jenny gave up every- 
thing for the sake of that disreputable sailor, and 
I'd take my oath he'd never come back to her, 
either." 

"She had the satisfaction anyway of enjoying one 
glorious adventure," I defended. 

"I don't call it a glorious adventure. That's just 
the trouble with the story. In my day, the novels 
had characters who did things and were good and 



[ 25 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

noble. You could tell in the first chapter whom to 
admire and whom to despise. In this story the 
characters aren't like heroes and heroines in books. 
They are just like the people you meet in everyday 
life. It's not the kind of pleasure reading I'm used 
to." 

The book under discussion was Nocturne, and I 
thought that my Aunt Eunice, quite against her will, 
had paid the author, Mr. Swinnerton, the supreme 
compliment. My own estimate of the work com- 
pletely coincided with hers; but my pleasure-pain 
reactions were so exactly opposite, after reading 
Nocturne, that I felt, instead of homesick longings 
for Victorian perfection, a surge of unrest to get 
hold of other books of Mr. Swinnerton's and to 
find out why they seemed so different from anything 
else I had ever read. 

I am one of those meretricious readers who glide 
rapidly over the pages of a book and forget. I 
forget titles and plots and, unless there is something 
very unusual indeed about the context, only the 
most leading conversation about the characters can 
make me remember having read the book at all. So 
it was no slight prick to my interest in Mr. Sv/in- 
nerton w^hen, having finished Nocturne, I found 
myself thinking quite warmly and vividly of another 
book which had strayed into my hands some six 
years before. This was The Happy Family. In 
spite of the fact that, at the time, Arnold Bennett, 



[ 26 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

H. G. Wells, May Sinclair, Granville Barker and 
various others were putting forth exhaustive studies 
of the various strata of English middle class family 
life, this tale had the faculty of simultaneously arous- 
ing and satisfying curiosity as none of the other books 
did. It dealt v^^ith the life of the London suburbs 
and it depicted so ruthlessly the discontents of this 
unromantic and irritating class of people, w^hose sor- 
didness, vulgarity, and aping snobbishness are for- 
ever doing battle with the fine idealism, the high 
adventurousness of its own striving youth — that even 
my volatile gray matter retained the impression. I 
asked all my friends about the book. None of them 
had read it. in one of them had even heard of 
Frank Swinnerton. 

In the lapse of six years, however, the veil has 
lifted. Now it is difficult to find a reader on whom 
one can flash the work of Mr. Swinnerton as a 
"discovery." He has many friends and correspond- 
ents on this side of the Atlantic. And by pricking 
up my ears when I happened into "literary circles," 
by begging glimpses of his letters, and by resorting 
to the meager data furnished by publishers, I was 
quite easily able to satisfy myself as to why Mr. 
Swinnerton stands out so sharply against the erotic 
homogeneity of the younger English writers. It is 
because he himself was one of the shackled young 
adventurers of the London suburbs. And the life 
he saw about him, petty, exacting, devoid of dra- 



[ 27 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

matics, was the life he put into his books. That is 
why Great-aunt Eunice, missing her heroes and her- 
oines, denounced him, and that is why he seems to 
me unique in his craft. 

When I say that Mr. S winner ton portrayed the 
life of which he himself was a product, I do not 
mean that his work is in any sense autobiographical. 
Certain facts about himself naturally, and about 
those with whom he associated, are reproduced in 
his books. "At fourteen," he writes, "I went to 
work as an office boy in circumstances similar to 
those in which Stephen Moore {The Chaste Wife) 
began. The previous years had been years of serious 
illness and starvation." Again he says: "The char- 
acter of Amberley, m On the Staircase, is a sort of 
semi-self-portrait, but gilded for purposes of fictional 
interest. The Happy Family enshrines some memo- 
ries of very early days and gives some of my pub- 
lishing experience. On the Staircase holds this much 
of personal reminiscence that the flat in which the 
Grettons live at the top of the house in Great James 
Street is the flat in which my family lived for a 
couple of years." 

These, however, are only incidents, and they are 
relieved and illumined, as is all Mr. Swinnerton's 
work, with imaginative insight and interpretative 
suggestion. According to one who knows him 
well, "Mr. Swinnerton thinks one should not nar- 
rate literally the events of one's own life in writing 



[ 28 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

fiction, and he rarely adopts suggestions from real 
persons for his characters." 

But those who are curious about the facts of the 
author's life need not dig out "the man behind the 
book" to find them. Mr. Swinnerton makes no 
mystery of them and they are not such as would 
stimulate sensation hunters. His is a story of suc- 
cess wrung from poverty, serious ill health, and un- 
propitious circumstance. He owes much to the in- 
terest of the friends whom his quiet, rather baffling 
personality never failed to win for him; but more 
he owes to his own ordered will v*^hich would al- 
ways concentrate on the good ahead, no matter how 
distressing and upsetting the details of material ex- 
istence might be. 

He was born in 1884, and from the first was up 
against the cruelties of London at its worst, but 
alwa3's through the sordidness and gloom a kindly 
star shone above his head. During his period as 
office boy his employers, recognizing the serious am- 
bition of the thoughtful lad, encouraged him to use 
his spare time to write. In a few years, through 
the interest of a friend, he found his way into the 
office of J. M. Dent and Company, the publishers 
of the Temple Classics and the Everyman Library. 
Here, in the atmosphere of a scholarly house, he 
began his first novel. This book, finished at the 
age of eighteen, marks the beginning of a career 
which, though still so young, falls naturally into 



[ 29 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

three periods. The first Includes three novels that 
were never published; the second includes three 
novels that were published but not read; and the 
third includes a bevy of novels some of which have 
taken two continents by the ears. 

But the work of the first period was not wasted, 
even though the fine script of its many, many hun- 
dred pages (I have seen a sample and it Is the most 
beautiful handwriting in the world) was soon fed 
to hungry flames by the author. Young Swinnerton 
was busy all this time acquiring technique, learning 
how to develop in sharp black and white the im- 
pressions made on the highly sensitized film of his 
mind. It was a short tragedy written at this time 
that won for him the enthusiastic confidence of Mr. 
Philip Lee Warner, who soon asked Swinnerton 
to be proof manager for the firm of Chatto and 
Windus, in which he was a partner. Spurred by 
the congeniality of his work and his surroundings, 
the young man dedicated his evenings to writing. 
His first book. The Merry Heart, he bashfully sub- 
mitted, at Mr. Warner's request, to the house, 
where, to avoid embarrassment, it was sent to an 
outside reader who had no knowledge of the author. 
Swinnerton received the notice of its acceptance on 
the occasion of his twenty-fourth birthday. What 
a birthday that was only those who have similarly 
striven can know. But the young author did not 
celebrate it with champagne. He went to work on 



[ 30 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

another story. The Young Idea won from Arnold 
Bennett the cryptic comment that Swinnerton "knew 
his business so well that he didn't need anyone to 
show him his faults." Followed The Casement^ 
and apropos of these three books of the second 
period, Floyd Dell, the first American critic to take 
notice of the young author, said that Swinnerton 
knew all there was to know about the young girl, 
and prophesied that he would do "bigger work." 

The prophecy was speedily fulfilled, for the can- 
vas of The Happy Family is as inclusive as the 
suburbs of London. But the book that won him 
his first real' appreciation in literary England was 
his work on Gissing. All the various literary soci- 
eties and fraternities began to "rush" him, and Wells 
invited him to his house. On The Staircase created 
a mild furore in London and won him the friendship 
of Arnold Bennett. A critical study of Robert 
Louis Stevenson done at this time earned Swinner- 
ton his first enemies — not very vindictive ones, but 
very angry ones. Then came the war and an ill- 
ness so long and serious that it almost put an end 
to this career so promisingly begun. But Swinnerton 
recovered and put all the ardor of his convalescence 
into The Chaste Wife. It is hard not to believe 
that Stephen Moore is a self-confession, so emotion- 
ally and unsparingly is this difficult, morose and 
tormented character drawn, but we must take the 
author's word for it that it is not. At all events, 



[ 31 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

the critical opinions expressed by Stephen so im- 
pressed the editor of the Manchester Guardian that 
he immediately wrote to Swinnerton asking him to 
do literary work for this paper. 

Nocturne was written in a period of the greatest 
domestic stress, illness, anxiety and loneliness. So 
great was the author's preoccupation that he had, 
as he says, no feeling biit shame for the work he 
was so hurriedly producing. When, however, after 
its completion, his own publisher said "it's a master- 
piece," and Arnold Bennett wrote, "A slight work, 
but just about perfect," and encomiums poured in 
from across the Atlantic, and requests for transla- 
tion privileges from the other side of the channel, 
his spirits rose to a height they had achieved only 
once before in his life, and that was on the occa- 
sion of his twenty-fourth birthday. Then followed 
Shops and Houses, a study of suburban life, a novel 
which reveals Swinnerton's emotional power with- 
out sentimentality, in the sympathetic portrayal of 
youth in conflict with family traditions, petty small- 
town gossip and social tyranny defended by age. 

Now he has just finished another book called 
September. This is a close study of feminine psy- 
chology. There are four principal characters, a 
man of about fifty, a woman of thirty-eight, a 
young man of five and twenty, and a girl of 
twenty-one. The emotional conflict between these 
characters, and particularly between the tw^o women, 



[ 32 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTOJS 

is the theme of the story. The tale is divided into 
three books, each bearing the name of one of the 
characters. 

Swinnerton is now editorial adviser for the firm 
of Chatto and Windus. He still continues to w^rite 
literary criticisms for the Manchester Guardian and 
in spare moments is a professional dramatic critic. 
He contributes articles, short stories and plays to 
current English periodicals. Thus it will be seen 
that his days are very full. Some idea of his power 
of concentration may be got from the fact that Noc- 
turne was written in six weeks less a fortnight, in 
which the story could not be made to progress be- 
yond a scene on board the yacht; while September 
was written in four months. Nocturne has been 
translated into Dutch, Danish and Swedish. 

Of his characters Mr. Swinnerton humorously 
comments: ''They don't go down on their knees to 
me or interpose their own wills in any matter af- 
fecting their own future. They are real enough to 
exist apart from the things written down for them, 
but they cause no sleepless nights. Indeed, I have 
a scrupulous fancy and do the best I can for them !" 



[ 33 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

As Seen by an Editor 

By GRANT M. OVERTON 

Editor, New York Sun Book Review 

OF the five novels of Frank Swinnerton that I 
have seen, all are worthy of attentive reading 
by anyone who cares at all for contemporary fiction 
in England and America. The best of the five — 
they are, in order, The Happy Family, On the 
Staircase, The Chaste Wife, Nocturne, and Shops 
and Houses — is the superb Nocturne; but this book 
is a special feat and anyone acquainted with it is 
likely to feel the unfairness of involving other books 
in comparisons with it. Putting Nocturne to one 
side, on a pedestal not ranged with the others, the 
thing to notice is the steady lifting into eminence 
of Mr. Swinnerton's other books, in the order in 
which they have reached us. Each is a better per- 
formance than its predecessor. The superiority of 
On the Staircase over The Happy Family may not 
be remarkable, but The Chaste Wife marks an ad- 
vance all can see, while Shops and Houses, comedy 
though it is, will give readers more satisfaction than 
The Chaste Wife, because it has more contact with 
the ordinary range of thought, feeling and observa- 
tion. 

We talk about romanticists and realists loosely, 
but I think it will be found that the business of a 



[ 35 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

novelist ordinarily resolves itself into one of two 
broad tasks. Either he is going to take the im- 
probable, the w^eird, the incredible and the bizarre 
and so present it to us that we can enter into it 
with the sense of "This did happen! I can see how 
he (or she) came to act thus and so!" — or our 
novelist is going to take a piece of everydayness and 
make us re-live it in the sense of how wonderful 
it all was. I suspect that the novelist who essays 
the first task is the one we call a "romanticist" and 
the writer who tackles the second is our "realist." 
Failures in the first enterprise are very likely as fre- 
quent as in the second; but they are neither as con- 
spicuous nor as dismal. This is partly because our 
imaginations exert themselves to help the romantic 
writer while they lie sluggishly inert in the presence 
of the realist, waiting for him to rouse them from 
heavy torpor. Besides, it is only in the last half 
century, or a little more, that the realist (in the 
sense I have suggested) has been writing. Many 
Victorian minds still look upon him as an experi- 
mentalist engaged in a highly dubious enterprise. 

Now of course Mr. Swinnerton is a realist in 
these terms. But you can't tag a writer as a "ro- 
manticist" or a "realist" and let it go at that. Most 
people would call Joseph Conrad a romanticist and 
be mainly right; but some of the most perfect real- 
ism in the world is in his The Secret Agent, and 
his Chance is full of it. Making the extraordinary 

[ 36 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

real and making the commonplace wonderful are, 
properly considered, complementary enterprises of 
the story-teller. The episode of Jenny and the sailor 
Keith Redington in Nocturne is as romantic a piece 
of business as a novelist could have to deal with. 
The love affair of Jenny's sister, Emmy, and the 
utterly usual Alf is a particularly fine example of 
the commonplace made wonderful. 

I think Nocturne is the most perfect work of 
imaginative sympathy I have ever read. I used to 
think, and perhaps I still think, that Mr. Conrad's 
Youth was the finest short story in English; but 
Youth is a "recapture," a beautiful moment of adora- 
ble recollection. Nocturne is not a remembered 
thing but an imagined thing. Frank Swinnerton 
has seen a shopgirl going home at dusk on a London 
tram car. He has, in his mind, gone with her, en- 
tered the house, looked upon the drudging Emmy 
and the bloated Pa. He has sat at supper with 
these three and has found it neither drab npr dull. 
Pathos and humor have disclosed their presence to 
him. And he has found just the right words. He 
is never satirical, never harsh, never sentimental; 
he is kindly, tolerant, understanding, just. He sees 
beauty and romance, and he makes you see them. 
It is incredible to me that anyone could read Noc^ 
turne and not be moved and comforted by it. Well ! 
When you have written a book of which that can 
be said, the world owes you something! \1 



[ 37 ] 



BOOKS BY 

FRANK SWINNERTON 

Description and Comment 

SEPTEMBER 

ACCORDING to custom the Howard Forsters 
have come down to their quiet country place 
at the beginning of summer. Marian Forster, in 
her late thirties still wonderfully young, turns her 
mind wearily to the future- Howard, over fifty, over 
fed, pathetically foolish in the pursuit of the pleas- 
ures of youth has ceased to count; within herself 
she feels alone, without any special interest in what 
is to come. Then two things happen : she meets 
Nigel Sinclair, and Cherry Mant's mother sends 
Cherry to visit Marian. With Nigel, Marian ex- 
periences a swift, delightful understanding. She is 
fascinated with trying to understand Cherry, beauti- 
ful, undeveloped, strangely sophisticated, subtly per- 
verse, immediately hostile to Marian, envious of her 
mature calm. Cherry's relations with Howard, 
Marian's brief poignant happiness in Nigel's love, 
and, back in town in September, her loss of him to 
Cherry's triumphant youth, make up a tale of the 
passionate conflict of two strongly contrasted tem- 
peraments. Nothing Mr. Swinnerton has done is 
so finely penetrating as the friendship and the con- 
flict between these two women. Over and above 
the story, wonderfully sustained, informing the 



[ 39 ] 



A 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

whole so that it becomes as one event, broods the 
mood of September, the autumnal quality in 
Marian's life. 

"It is indeed, a very able book. With candor 
and sincerity Mr. Swinnerton has applied his brain 
to a very difficult task. The development is original, 
has an unusual air of truth. Marian Forster's 
figure is finely logically outlined. Her spoils from 
the contest are neither romantic nor showy. Among 
modern novelists very few would choose to make 
the fruit of the contest something so quiet. Few 
would plan their story so consistently with that end 
in view. We have read with the conviction that we 
are being asked to attend to a problem worth solv- 
ing — a conviction so rare as by itself to prove that 
SEPTEMBER is a novel of exceptional merit."— 
London Times Literary Supplement. 

SHOPS AND HOUSES 

WITH the indignation of youth against the in- 
stinct of oppression as its theme, this is an 
absorbing story of modern life in an English sub- 
urban town, near enough to London to be the 
home of city men. It is an exquisitely humorous 
picture of small-town snobbishness. A black-sheep 
of one of the 'first families' has the effrontery to 
return and set up as a grocer in Beckwith itself! 
The solution here of the exciting tangle wrought is 
through love. And even Mr. Swinnerton has never 

[ 40 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

been happier than in his portrayal of Louis Vechan- 
tors, of Dorothy and of Veronica — and of the town 
gossip, Miss Lampe. "One marvels at the extraor- 
dinary acuteness of it all." — London Bookman. 

"A bright study in fiction of suburban town life 
— while even the most masterly portrayal of small 
town types may leave the sympathy chilled and in- 
ert, or transformed into vexed impatience, no such 
fate could befall such a rarely artistic disclosure of 
loyalty and courage and pure passion as Mr. Swin- 
nerton's narrative of the triumph of true love over 
all obstacles of shops and houses." — Philadelphia 
North American. 

"An exquisitely humorous picture of small town 
snobbishness." — San Francisco Chronicle. 

"The book is, of course, admirably written. Mr. 
Swinnerton knows a good deal about human nature, 
and he sets forth his knowledge with many admira- 
ble and illuminating little touches." — New York 
Times. 

"The day after finishing Shops and Houses you 
are likely to chuckle at every one concerned, your- 
self included. You are equally likely to wait with 
impatience for the author's next." — New York Sun. 

NOCTURNE 

NOCTURNE is only a tale of the million 
commonplace loves of a million common- 
place people in which, as humanity's great heart 



[ 41 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

well knows, there is little that is either supremely 
elevating or meanly sordid. 

With a few touches less assured, or a single situ- 
ation vulgarized or even overwrought, Mr. Swin- 
nerton's story would have fallen in ruins. That he 
has been gifted with power to portray low life with- 
out crassness, and artistically to suggest the pathetic 
yearnings of the lowly for joj^s of life they can never 
attain, nor even understand, is sufficient warrant of 
primacy in a new, exigent school of fiction which 
creates beauty out of sheer fidelity of vision, with 
almost artless verity of description and character- 
ization. — Philadelphia North Ainerican. 

''This is a book that will not die. It is perfect, 
authentic, and alive. If Mr. Swinnerton were 
never to write another word, I think he might count 
on this much of his work living when many of the 
more important reputations of today may have 
served their purpose in the world and become no 
more than fading names. Mr. Swinnerton has 
written four or five other novels before this one, 
but none of them compares with it in quality." — 
H. G. Wells. 

"Humor and romance. What could be more ro- 
mantic than Jenny's adventure that night? Beauty. 
Not a beauty of surroundings, though Jenny found 
herself in enchanting surroundings, but the beauty 
of a great love and a sword-sharp jealousy guard- 



[ 42 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

ing it. Pathos in the figure of Pa and the relation 
of his girls to him. And always the right word. 
Infallibly the right word, never satirical, never 
harsh, never sentimental; kindly, tolerant, under- 
standing, just. If this is what you mean by realism, 
read Nocturne and be moved and comforted by it." 
— New York Sun. 

"If to write such a book as Nocturne is not to 
write a great book, then what is?" — Los Angeles 
Times. 

"Mr. Swinnerton demands no alteration and sues 
for no reforms. Mentally he is an aristocrat if there 
ever was one." — The Neiu York Evening Post. 

THE HAPPY FAMILY 

THE HAPPY FAMILY is a realistic comedy 
of life in London suburbs. The scenes are 
laid principally in Kentish Town, with excursions 
to Hampstead, Highgate, and Gospel Oak; while 
unusual pictures of the publishing trade form a 
setting to the highly important office-life of the 
chief male characters. The book shows these in- 
dividuals both at work and at play, and endeavors 
to suggest something of the real life of a class which 
is very rarely treated in fiction. While it is thus 
a sympathetic and veracious study, however. The 
Happy Family is concerned with people rather than 
problems; for against the background of suburban 



[ 43 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

and office-life it shows the courageous figures of a 
girl and a young man, both with their own battles 
to fight, emerging at length into freedom and hap- 
piness. Although parts of the book are pathetic, 
and even tragic, its tone throughout is optimistic; 
and it resembles the author's previous work in the 
qualities of freshness and humor. 

"For clever, even brilliant analysis of character 
and description of unconsidered details of family 
and social life, Mr. Swinnerton must take high 
rank, and these qualities give his book much merit." 
— Boston Globe. 

"His style is controlled, ironic, sometimes vivid, 
always unemotional. The novel commands atten- 
tion as a production of exceptional ability and in- 
telligence." — New York Times. 

"He displays the Amerson family with numerous 
of its branches as easily as another writer would 
conduct a tete a tete. He knows a hundred fam- 
ilies like the Amersons. He knows the women as 
well as the men, the typists as well as the clerks, 
and he reproduces them with honest art." — Chicago 
Evening News. 

"People who do not like to read about 'sordid 
and commonplace' people (that is, themselves and 
their neighbors) are warned to eschew Mr. Swin- 
nerton's book, and also Balzac and some other men 



[ 44] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

of reputed talent. But those of firmer vision and 
more flexible sympathy will find in The Happy 
Family some very great qualities, candor, sanity, 
right-thinking, and fundamental humor." — Boston 
Herald. 

THE CHASTE WIFE 

MARRIAGE or happiness — or both! Mr. 
Swinnerton, w^hose frank realism has often 
been compared to that of Gissing, finds the secret 
in a single word: Truth. Priscilla Evandene was 
happy, though Stephen earned a small pittance. 
Love, and utter confidence, kept her happy. But 
Stephen had to have his secret, as so many men do. 
And when Priscilla's confidence deserted her, love 
threatened to go, too! The whole perplexing prob- 
lem of marital felicity is stripped of its wrappings 
in this tale of love's triumph over a man's mistaken 
idea of "kindness to his wife." 

"It is quite unlike modern novels in that it is 
fine and brave and big. Mr. Swinnerton is to be 
congratulated on having written a novel that is 
something more than just good, and that should 
outlast the 'season.' " — Chicago Evening Post. 

''The Chaste Wife is a story of marriage written 
with sobriety and keen insight. . . . Character is 
cleanly drawn and sanely developed and there is no 
fumbling in this story." — Boston Herald. 

"Frank Swinnerton's The Chaste Wife is the 
[ 45 ] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

Story of a poor book reviewer so foolhardy as to get 
married." — The Globe. 

"The Chaste Wife is admirably conceived and 
finished. Through the w^indow^ the author throws 
open for us we look in upon the lives and thoughts 
of a group of people, all real, and most of them 
likable, whom we watch with interest, and of whose 
further experiences, after the last chapter is reached 
and the window closed, we would like to be told." 
— New York Times. 

"The Chaste Wife will widen Frank Swinner- 
ton's public; it is written, moreover, with sparkle 
and polish and suggests that the author really loves 
his work." — Chicago Herald. 

"Reading Mr. Swinnerton's story is like coming 
into the sunshine and fresh air after a long, stifling 
period in a dark, poorly ventilated building. The 
delicate accuracy with which he distinguishes his 
characters is done so easily that we have no imme- 
diate thought of how high a degree of art is re- 
quired for such perfection of outline." — Boston 
Evening Transcript. 

ON THE STAIRCASE 

YOU do not meet life singly, as an individual, 
no matter what the ordinary novels say! 
The unit of life is the family. The family's per- 
sonality determines each member. 



46] 



FRANK SWINNERTON 

Frank Swinnerton is one of the few writers who 
realize that fact. He writes with cynical humor, 
genial sympathy, distinguished realism. He here 
chronicles two families, a cramped menage, and a 
well-rounded, cheerful household — gay father, a 
talkative mother, a girl who works, and her brother, 
w^ho teases, and her suitors, who yearn. 

Delightful is the incidental romance of Susan, 
that motherly young person who expected to be an 
old maid, but amazedly found herself the center of 
an idyll. 

"Its narrative comes to close grips with life." — 
New York Evening Post. 

"In defiance of all claims of the individualists, 
Mr. Swinnerton hymns the family. On the Stair- 
case is the picture of two groups, Barbara Gretton 
and her household, gay, quarrelsome, affectionate, 
independent, and Adrian Velancourt and Cissie, his 
wife — inevitable tragedy is here and Swinnerton 
handles it with sureness and delicacy — but he is not 
afraid of amusing observation and bright humor 
and good cheer." — New York Tirnes. 

"On the Staircase is an entrancing novel of the 
experiences, adventures, emotions of a little group 
of ordinary young people. ... It is a living 
story." — The Independent. 

"On the Staircase is a delightful novel. The 
praise it has received from London critics is de- 
served." — Boston Herald. 

[47 ] 



